Tate

Tate

Tate has four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day, and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks. Tate’s work ranges from conservation and research to learning and media. Everything we do supports our mission: to promote public understanding and enjoyment of British, modern and contemporary art. Part of our 2015 vision is to be sustainable by being financially sustainable, ensuring that scholarship and research are part of the fabric of our activities, and demonstrating leadership in response to climate change.

Our energy use

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Study our data

Tate shares its sustainability data so that everybody
can help to identify new savings and suggest improvements. The
icons below show the utility data currently available for each year.

If you have ideas on how Tate could
use energy more efficiently, please let us know!

2017

Tate 2017 Electricity half-hourly data is generated
Daily.
It was first created at
30 Jan 2017, 10:42 a.m.,
last updated at
and has a maximum extent of
1 year.

Our buildings

Our estate

Click on a building to learn more about it.

Notes about Tate

Notes about Tate

How do you calculate the CO2e emissions from a unit of energy used?

Energy retailers and the government produce conversion factors that describe the typical carbon impact of different energy sources. These allow us to take the energy uses (in their respective units), and calculate the approximate carbon dioxide emissions, normally measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (kgCO2e). Defra's UK conversion factors may be found at Defra's 2015 Guidelines.
For Tate, carbon conversion factors of grid electricity are based on the carbon factors from Tate's energy utility provider. The factors in use are 0.50035 per kWh for electricity.

How do you get these data from the buildings?

Getting these energy data out of some buildings is harder than others, but in general the buildings contain a small low-power computer which takes very frequent readings from the electricity meters and stores the data. Every few seconds, this computer sends the information it has collected to a server. Your browser will then ask this server for the data it needs in order to draw the real-time detailed graphs and website teasers. The energy impact of this process is very low, and it gets lower with each additional site that uses the system.
Data acquisition at Tate Modern is through third party systems that connect directly to the fiscal meters on the site. These collect performance data for each full half hour, and do not show any detail within each half-hour period. The systems introduce a delay that means we cannot show the energy data until the day after they have happened (this pattern is called, in the energy industry, 'day plus one' data.

What do the colours on the graph mean?

For buildings, the colours in the graph show approximately how the current level of usage would lead to a given Operational Rating – as set out on a Display Energy Certificate (DEC) – if the performance for a given moment carried on for an entire year. This goes from dark green for ‘A’ to red for ‘G’. We calibrate this using input data used for generating the building’s DEC, together with information relating to 'normal' buildings of its type. If we do not have data for all of the utilities noted in the DEC then the graph will appear in a light-blue colour scale, to indicate that the usage displayed on the graph is not representative of the full energy use of this building. Graphs for communities also show in this blue colour scale.

Why are you using these units and what do they mean?

We provide three different measures of the energy used: the amount of energy, its monetary cost, and the carbon impact of the energy used.
Energy use is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), which are the standard units of a home energy bill (1kWh is the amount of electricity used by ten 100W light bulbs in one hour).
For electricity this number represents the amount of energy that flows into a building through the meter, and excludes distribution losses. For gas it is the amount of energy that is theoretically available by burning all the gas in an imaginary ideal burner. For district heating it reflects a flow of temperature into the building over time (after the heat produced by burning the fuel has been transported to the meter, which involves other losses). So each of these numbers, while all being measured in kWh, mean very different things. This is one reason that we prefer to use 'units per hour' when combining them. In some ways it would be more correct not to combine them at all, because combining them implies that the measures are comparable. This is a global challenge though, and conventions have become established around combining kWh. So we'll have to fix that another day.
Monetary cost is calculated using the costs per 'unit' for each utility in every building. The figures used are noted below in the Notes section.
The carbon impact is measured in kg of CO2e (the e stands for equivalent) which takes other climate-affecting gasses into account in addition to carbon dioxide.

How much does this organisation pay for its energy?

Prices come from the latest energy bills for Tate, which for electricity average out at 7.98p per unit.